With computers now shipping with UEFI Secure Boot enabled, users of any OS other than Windows 8 will want to know how to circumvent it. Jesse Smith of DistroWatch tells how he did it here. The Linux Foundation describes its approach here. If you want to boot an OS other than Windows 8, you'll want to figure this out before you buy that new computer.

As a side note - don't think about the price alone. Think about other things:
- you don't buy your hardware that often
- you are not forced to upgrade your hardware that often when you use FLOSS operating system

People generally don't "upgrade hardware" for an OS - they use it until it starts to die, and then some... (maybe not in some more lavish places, but an OS won't change that)